The New Middle East (14 page)

‘I am Khalid al-Islambuli, I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,’ said the man who led the gunmen as they rampaged around the stand.
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At his trial the following year al-Islambuli yelled to the gallery that he had killed Sadat because he did not rule in accordance with Sharia and because of the treaty he signed with Israel. He was one of five men executed for the attack. The men were all part of the Islamist group Al-Jihad which the young Ayman al-Zawahiri had helped set up shortly after Sayyib Qutb’s death.

Sadat believed he could get away with defying almost the entire Arab world because he thought he had neutralised opposition at home and was winning new friends in the West. That mistake cost him his life. ‘[Anwar Sadat] took the fundamentalists out of the bottle,’ wrote al-Zawahiri. ‘[His] assumption of power marked the beginning of a new political transformation in Egypt represented by the end of the Russian era and the start of the American era.’
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‘Sadat was personally attuned to an Islamist idea of life,’ Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer told me as we sat in his study in Princeton University. During his twenty-nine-year career in the United States Foreign Service he acted as his country’s ambassador to both Egypt and Israel.

[Sadat] saw the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood under Nasser as a negative, and right after he came to power after 1970 there was the attempted coup by the Left. So everything would have led him to turn to the right as an internal stabiliser, and in that respect I think Zawahiri is right, there was a sense of opening that door or letting it out of the bottle a little. He tried in 1981 to stuff it back in but by then it was much too late.

By the late Seventies, the Brotherhood had been brought back to life by a huge transfusion of young blood. It came by absorbing new Islamist movements that began to flourish on the university campuses in the decade that followed the defeat in 1967. The most important figure in this trend was Abdul-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, who in 1975 would become the president of Cairo University’s Student Union.

Nasser, his regime and his oppression, were broken, which allowed us to openly express our religious belief once more. Therefore, as university students we succeeded in creating an Islamic wave which was not affiliated to any trends, neither Muslim Brotherhood nor anything else. But our movement belonged to the Islamic identity in its simplest and shallowest forms. It had no depth. This continued until 1974 or 1975 when the Muslim Brotherhood leaders started to get out of prisons. For us the Ikhwan were the heroes of Islam, they were executed, thrown in prisons, etc. We embraced them and because they were older, it was natural for us to put them at the top of the movement, the popular Islamic trend.

The Brotherhood leadership walked out of jail to find themselves able to take over, shape and absorb a newly rejuvenated Islamic movement into the Ikhwan fold.

The moment that best reflected this new-found confidence of the young Islamist movements was a live debate between Student Union president Aboul-Fotouh and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. It is still talked about in Egypt today, because during it Aboul-Fotouh publicly mocked Sadat, while Sadat angrily demanded the young Islamist show him some respect. ‘It was really not planned, it just happened,’ Aboul-Fotouh told me with a wide smile.

I honestly did not expect Sadat to be that angry because I did not mean to offend him. After the event my colleagues came over and started bidding me farewell, but luckily the meeting was on air, so I was saved. But Sadat made sure I was never appointed in any university, although I was top of my class at medical school. My father was really horrified, because rumours spread that Sadat ordered his guards to kill the student who had talked and to run him over with a car on the spot. For months later, my father, the poor man, would suddenly be frantically running around campus looking for me after hearing new rumours of my death, to make sure I was still alive!

Over time with the new members came new ways of working, less secrecy and less blind obedience. During this period the Brotherhood publicly renounced violence. As it evolved it also moved decisively into tackling people’s physical, not just spiritual, health. Its new leadership, some of whom are still influential figures today, spoke out about the poverty and corruption that were gnawing at the country. The Brotherhood began to fill the gap left by the failures of the state. Its legendary pragmatism was now used to find practical solutions for ordinary people rather than just self-preservation for the movement. This approach brought them new members, many of whom came from the middle classes. The Brotherhood also by now had a new leader, Omar al-Tilimsani. When he took over in 1973 he was supposed to be another façade for the Special Apparatus, but he was cannier than al-Hodeibi.

Early on in his leadership many members were still heavily influenced by the radical thinking of the men from the Special Apparatus, which was still in thrall to the ideas of Qutb. He balanced out the influence of the radicals by introducing more moderates to the leadership group. He then managed the two sides until Sadat’s assassination led to the more extremist elements all being locked up again.

In 1981 Ambassador Kurtzer was doing his first tour in Cairo as a young political officer at the US embassy in Cairo:

Six to eight months before the assassination the ambassador pulled us together and said: ‘There’s something wrong here. I don’t want to see anyone in the embassy, you’ve got to be out knocking on doors.’ So we were reporting for six to eight months the stench of a society that had gone wrong. Shortly after we started that Sadat began his crackdown. It was an undifferentiated crackdown because he was arresting everybody, left, right, centre, it didn’t matter. So the actual assassination of course shocked everybody because you never expect it to happen, it’s the ‘black swan’, but you’re not surprised that that situation produced something dramatic.

For a week afterwards the only concern we had was that this was something larger than a one-off killing. Islamists were attacking police stations and so forth. When the government reasserted control in a sense everyone got comfortable again. We knew Mubarak, he’d been the vice-president for years. I don’t think anyone thought he would be a short-term leader, but nobody knew how long he would last. But the key in everybody’s mind was restoring stability, and once that happened the comfort groove just took over.

The comfort groove stretched on for thirty years. The assassination of Anwar Sadat by an extremist Islamist group with links to the Brotherhood provided a good reason for a whole new generation of American foreign policy makers to fear them, so they began building their policy instead around Hosni Mubarak and what he represented, which was no big ideas and no big surprises. He remained true to form until the end. He was not a great man, he was not an inspiring man, and he did not achieve great things.

During Mubarak’s rule the cycle of accommodation and confrontation between the army and the Brotherhood would go on. In that time the army’s position in Egyptian society sank further, as did the calibre of its leadership. Its dependence on American aid grew, and so it started to lose its capacity for independent thought. While the Ikhwan adjusted to the changing world, the last Egyptian dictator would spend his rule trying to hold together the system he inherited as it crumbled around him. And he would fail.

II: Revolution

‘We are turning into Afghanistan,’ said Ahmed. ‘It’s an uncompleted revolution, and if you are asking me which direction we are going in, then honestly I don’t know.’ Ahmed ran a travel agency. It was an industry hammered by the violence and uncertainty of the first year after the revolution took place. I met him walking with his two teenage daughters in January 2012 a few blocks from the People’s Assembly building in Cairo just after it had started its first session of the post-Mubarak era.

‘Last January I was very proud, very proud, now I’m disappointed. Did you see the parliament, how they were looking? I mean, first time in my life to see in the Egyptian parliament, gallabiyas [traditional long Arab robes] with jackets over it!’

The new parliamentarians, most of them Islamists, wore Western suit jackets over their traditional long shapeless robes. Not only did they not look like modern democrats, they did not act like them either.

‘For me parliament is a circus, it’s big beard versus small beard, who can be more right-wing than the other, who can be more obsessed with sex and moral values than the other, and who can waste all this time talking about Internet porn and not teaching English in school, whereas the majority of Egyptians’ concerns are unemployment, poverty and security on the streets,’ said the writer and activist Mona Eltahawy, who was still recovering from being attacked and sexually assaulted three months earlier in protests against the ruling SCAF. ‘The Muslim Brotherhood have been utterly ineffective in delivering any of that, so I think for the average Egyptian who thought: “OK, you know what, they seemed like good people, they helped me when the regime didn’t and they talk about God,” they look at them now and say: “They are crap at politics, they can go back to the mosque.” ’

But they did not. This was not what the young people who led the Egyptian revolution wanted, but it was what they had feared they might get. It was not what the most powerful man on earth had been hoping for from the start either. ‘What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president. What I think is that this is going to be long and hard,’ said President Obama to an aide at the time of the uprising.
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He was referring to Wa’el Ghonim, a Google executive and Internet activist who was held by the police for eleven days during the protest. President Obama did not get his wish, and it was longer and harder than anyone imagined.

The second year after the revolt was full of anger and protest too. The army and the Brotherhood were still dancing around each other looking for weaknesses. Each knew a decisive moment would come. As they did so they trampled over the rights and ambitions of the Egyptian people who had led the revolt. The decline in quality of the officer corps had been hidden under Mubarak, but now it was there for everyone to see as the army bungled its way through a period of direct rule. For years promotion in the military was about stepping into dead men’s shoes, but the top generals had just lived on and on. They were totally out of touch with the generation that had taken to the streets. These old men were publicly abused from the outside and privately cursed from within.

The Brotherhood’s leaders were no spring chickens either, and their power structures were almost as top-down as the military’s. But they adjusted quicker to the new political landscape, because that was something they had been learning to do for decades just to survive. They would claim victory in a major battle of their long war with the army, though not without suggestions of a bit of match fixing. Flush from that, they would immediately square up against a new opponent: the People. In July 2013 that was a battle the Ikhwan would lose.

As the second anniversary of the Egyptian uprising drew near, the title of ‘Pharaoh’ long associated with Hosni Mubarak had been resurrected to describe President Morsi. He had launched a power grab by issuing a decree that put himself and his office above the courts. He claimed he did it because the legal system was still stuffed with Mubarak regime counter-revolutionaries. Everyone else saw it for what it was, an attempt to force through the completion of the new constitution being written by the Islamist-dominated assembly before the courts could stop it, and driven by the Muslim Brotherhood’s not entirely unjustified and by now institutionalised paranoia that everyone was out to get them. Then Morsi rushed through a referendum on the hastily completed constitution, which as expected was approved because of the Brotherhood’s ability to mobilise its huge membership. Two years after Egyptians had got rid of Mubarak, the man in the Presidential Palace once again seemed to think that he and his party were bigger than the nation they presided over.

‘New pharaoh?’ Morsi laughed. ‘Can I be? I’ve been suffering. I’ve been suffering, personally.’
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He was referring to his imprisonment by the old regime. Now he had swapped places with the man who originally put him there. Hosni Mubarak was at this stage sitting in jail, because of the life sentence he had been given in June 2012 for complicity in the killing of more than 800 protesters in the uprising against him. As the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood presidency started revealing some rather undemocratic tendencies, Mubarak must have been shouting: ‘I told you so!’ to anyone who would listen. He was right, he had, from the very moment his best friends in Washington presented him with the novel idea that he might allow his people the chance to choose their leaders for themselves.

If President George W. Bush’s ‘Freedom Agenda’ had a high-water mark, then it was in the city of Cairo in June 2005. That was when he sent his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to what she described as the ‘cultural and political heart of the Middle East’.
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Ms Rice believed: ‘A democratic Egypt would change the region like nothing else. It was in that spirit I went to the American University in Cairo to deliver a speech on democracy in the Middle East.’
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